Three Mini-Rules of Thumb

In prior columns I’ve looked at several of the “big” rules of thumb in cataloging—truths large enough to fill a whole column with their ins and outs.

But this month, as a change of pace, I thought we’d take a look at three “mini” rules of thumb, each too small for a whole column, yet each important in its area, and well worth knowing for the cautious cataloger. So let’s get started.

Mini Rule of Thumb #1:

“List rollouts never perform as well as list tests.”

This little rule sounds like pure pessimism at first (“Ahhh, nothin’ ever works right.”)But it’s far more than that: List brokers have long been familiar with this frustrating rule, and so have careful catalogers.

In fact, this rule comes as a surprise primarily to new catalogers. It’s so non-intuitive that many newcomers simply refuse to accept it, until black and white results force them to rethink. (And if they don’t track their results very well, as many newcomers don’t, it can often elude them for years.)

It’s an easy rule to apply in practice: If a list earns a 2-percent response on a test, you should project a lower response rate on rollout, perhaps 1.75 percent, perhaps less.

What’s harder is to understand why it works this way. Nobody knows the exact reason, but here are two possibilities:

1. “Evil list managers.” This explanation darkly suggests that list managers provide “better” names on list tests, to encourage rental income, then deliver the “real” names on rollout. This explanation has a certain paranoid appeal to it, but it lacks credibility in practice—even if a list manager wanted to do this, he/she would have a hard time getting the data processing house to figure out how to make it happen.

2. “It’s all luck.” This explanation says that all lists are actually about average, so any unusually good (or bad) performance by a specific list on a specific mailing is mostly just a fluke, which on subsequent mailings will go away, letting the list’s true averageness shine through.

Of these two explanations, the second sounds more plausible to me, and has the added advantage of being scientifically testable. It also implies the converse: that a list that performs badly on a test ought to perform better on rollout, and that’s a testable hypothesis. However, since no real cataloger is going to actually roll out to a bad list just to find out if it improves compared with its test, we’ll probably never know for sure whether this is why lists perform more weakly on rollout than on test. But they do.

Mini Rule of Thumb #2:

“Color houses and data processing firms will deliver at the last possible moment.”

This is another of those little rules that make no sense intuitively. With so many color houses and data processing (DP) firms vying for work, and considering the repetitive nature of their tasks, you’d think that they would have long since figured out how to meet deadlines as routinely as CNN reports headlines.

But in fact, no matter how much time you allow for a color or DP job, the last day will typically find you sitting on the edge of your chair, biting your nails as the clock races furiously toward the FedEx deadline.

In my first few years of cataloging, I thought it was my fault —maybe I was organizing my jobs inefficiently, or using weird vendors.

But during the years since, I’ve learned that nail-biting finishes are quite common.

Why? No one knows for sure, but here are two possibilities:

1. “It’s those doggone clients.” Color house and DP house sales reps typically point to late deliveries and last-minute changes by their clients as the reason for last-minute job completions. However, this doesn’t hold much water—all clients deliver jobs late and make changes. Color houses and DP firms have had years to develop business procedures for coping smoothly with such things. But they haven’t.

2. “It’s a fine old tradition.” Color house professionals I’ve discussed this with confirm that running right up to deadlines has been a way of life for them as long as they can remember, at most of the firms with which they’ve worked.

Regardless which explanation is correct (if either), is there anything you can do to ease the wear and tear on your nerves as deadlines approach with your color house and DP firm?

One idea many catalogers try (and they always think they’re the first to think of it) is to supply fake early deadlines, so when the color house or DP firm delivers late, they’ll actually be early. That sounds good in theory. But in fact, color houses and DP firms will usually end-run you and call your printer to find out the “real” deadline.

So you can probably look forward to lots of nail-biting finales during your years to come in cataloging.

Mini Rule of Thumb #3

“When you give changes to your designer, about 10 percent of them won’t get done.”

This annoying little fact of life in cataloging can be especially frustrating to new catalogers, since it often feels like the designer is making your life hard out of sheer carelessness. Catalogers say things like, “I told that designer clearly and slowly exactly what to change, and he/she still didn’t do it!”

And in fact, I’ve seen new catalogers abandon otherwise good designers, just because of this factor. And of course, the new designer behaves exactly the same way, until finally it dawns on the cataloger that something else is going on here.

What causes designers to behave in ways that look like simple carelessness to catalogers?

Well, unlike the other mini rules of thumb in this column, I think this rule has a pretty good explanation behind it.

It’s this: good catalogers are generally analytical, verbal and organized, but good designers are typically intuitive, visual and disorganized.

Which means that when a cataloger makes a nice, organized list of changes, and numbers each change, and faxes the list to the designer, the designer is going to start somewhere in the middle, and then loop to another part of the list, then jump forward and forget what part was already done, perhaps misplace the list for a little while, or get involved in some other design detail, and so on.

In my early years of cataloging I leaned hard on a few designers who I felt just weren’t trying to be organized.

But eventually, I realized that the designers I was working with were trying very hard indeed, and were simply having as much trouble being organized as I would have had trying to create a gorgeous page design on a blank sheet of paper.

In fact, as an extension of this little rule, you’ll often find that the most creative designers also have remarkably poor computer skills, and will turn in files built in very odd ways, with peculiar internal arrangements and strange omissions.

Think of this as the dark (disorganized) side of the (creative) force.

What’s the best way to cope with disorganization in the creative mind?

The best scheme I’ve come up with is simply to supply the organization yourself, and to arrange the job so that it’s virtually impossible for your designer’s innate disorganization to jump up and take control.

For example, when I have changes to give a designer, I usually do it by phone, with me reading one change at a time, while the designer actually makes the change then and there right on the computer screen. This lets the designer focus on just one thing at a time, minimizing the chance of distractions and mental side trips, while I organize the sequence and can focus on making sure that nothing is overlooked.

Is this process tedious? Does it take too much of my time on the phone? Would things go faster if creative designers could deal efficiently with printed, bulleted lists of changes? Of course—but in the real world, good designers tend to be bad organizers, and you’ll sleep better if you simply accept that fact, and take care of all organization yourself.

And that wraps up our three “mini” rules of thumb. Next time, another full-size cataloging rule of thumb.

Susan McIntyre is president of McIntyre Direct, a catalog consulting company based in Portland, OR. She can be reached at (503) 735-9515.